After over a year of development we're ready to announce the release of the first (and hopefully last) release candidate for KDE 3.2.0. Get it from download.kde.org or use Konstruct if you don't feel like calling configure by yourself. Due to the time constraints, don't expect distribution binaries, but they may pop up at download.kde.org URL too.

Well, fast enough! It will take my AXP 1700+ the whole night to yield my own Slackware-current packages.
Pfiou, gotta get an Opteron as soon as possible...
As anybody compiled KDE 3.2 in 64bits on an Opteron yet? Does it work? How does it feel?

And yes, this release will also contain bugs we'll fix at a later point - just
as any other software there is. Supporting software is a steady process, especially with such a huge collection as KDE is.

Open their source code? There's no need to be opensource to have bugs shown! Users don't care about bugs in the source code, but bugs they find while running ;)
Btw, they do have a site to report bugs, although I doubt they have a bug-counter showing-off their (lack of) quality :)

There aren't 5000 outstanding bugs. bugs.kde.org has 5000+ "bugs" in it's database, but only some of these are outstanding bugs. A lot of them are bugs that have been fixed. A lot of them are "wishlist" "bugs", feature requests, in other words. And a lot of them are marked as duplicates of outstanding, fixed, or wishlist bugs. bugs.kde.org is just an easy way to keep track of all that, not just a list of outstandint bugs.

I just wantet to tell anyone, who's worried about stability, to definitely give it a try. I've been using 3.2 since Mandrake Cooker released binary packages (and I've updated the ocassionaly) and it all works like a charm. The only issues are:

Please report bugs to http://bugs.kde.org . The people there are very responsive, and I am sure that if you report them (both are crashes <=> high priority, except for that gnome _treason_, of course :)) they will be looked at (maybe not corrected, but at least looked at) asap.

I'm compiling right now under Gentoo to help the RC1 bug squashing effort, so this can be the best release ever. This is the first time I'm going to use 3.2, but from the previews I've seen it looks stunning! I hope that, as per usual, the devs don't feel pressured to get this out before its ready for prime time, but I certainly hope this will be the last Release Candidate.

KDE 3.1.5 built in less than 6 hours (including downloads over a 256kbit/s ADSL line) on a 60Eur Athlon XP 2200+... Simply start the job before going to bed and wake up with a shiny new desktop...
Self-compiled KDE on my machine is twice as fast than the one shipping with SuSE 9, and their konqueror preloader doesn't change things so much...

I got KDE installed faster than that because I have a few gentoo machines sitting around on the network, so I merged distcc and it distributed the compile... if you do that, the compile can be done in less than an hour if your machines are fast :)

Hehe, the title is just kidding, of course. I just wanted to say that as a fellow Gentoo user who's been testing KDE 3.2 since beta 2, it's been smooth sailing for the whole time. RC1, hopefully, won't give me any trouble. And if it does, well, I'll be sure to send a bug report. :)

I'm sure there will be packages very soon. I'm making my own packages personnally.
You run for each KDE package (arts first, install, then kde-libs, install, then all the others) in the extracted directory:

./configure
make
make install DESTDIR=/usr/src/tmp

after creating a tmp directory in /usr/src.
Then you go into this /usr/src/tmp directory and you run :

makepkg -l y -c n ../-i486-1.tgz

you erase everything in the /usr/src/tmp directory with a "rm -Rf *" and you find your new package in /usr/src.
Repeat for all packages.
These are not entirely proper packages : there's no description, no README, etc. But good enough for personnal use.

you need a little more than that if you want standard slackware packages, but for personnal use it's ok.
Btw I never trust the packages from linuxpackages because I tried several ones and it never worked. The newbies should not be authorized to upload packages ... :)

There's an even easier way to make slackware packages, using the Checkinstall program.

From source, you compile like you normally would, but instead of typing 'make install' you type 'checkinstall'.

The script will automatically generate a slackware package after asking you a few questions. The name of the package will follow the slackware standard, and it will even collect as much of the documentation as it can to put under /usr/doc

After the script is done, you have a package that you can install, or move to a different computer, or backup so that you don't have to compile that source package ever again for slackware.

I think it's in the contrib/ folder of Slackware 9.1, but i recommend using the latest version (1.6beta3) which is available at http://checkinstall.izto.org/

I am seeing this problem as well. Kate doesn't seem to be able to paste when the text is cut from a different application. I've duped with khtml and kwrite. The middle mouse button does seem to work though.

I'm not using 3.2 (3.1.2 on RH7.3 is all we have at work), but copying and pasting is always a problem with me. Sometimes it just won't work. It's my number one complaint about KDE (I think it's a KDE problem because it only happens with KDE apps, in particular Kdevelop). I'm disappointed to hear that it's still happening (though to be fair, it seems that only a few of us suffer from it)

This time KDE is strictly following its release schedule. Good news, I jsut hope that they aren't following it for the sake of it and actually following it because everything is looking like they want to. Knowing KDE and how it has delayed its products when serious problems arose I'm confident that they are following the schedule because the product is ready.

If all goes well, I should be able to have it by February 5. (I hope its announced on th because 3+2 equals 5 and so it's a very lucky date to release it on =)

Also one thing that has improved but still left me dissapointed was the lack of marketing that KDE had for their releases. The new features guide only scratched the surface of how KDE 3.1 has improved, and didn't provide enough real world examples. Remeber even annoying bugfixes should eb listed, and not just by pointing to te bug number, but by explainining what has changed in detail. Vague statements like usability has improved are worthless. There should eb clear mentions of actions menu, wallpaper properties redesign, clock configuration redesigned and with details on why and how its better. I haven't actually tried 3.2 other than the broken one wth Mandrake's cooker, but if they release beta1 with 3.1.95 I will write about some of the new features too.

MARKETING IS AS IMPORTANT AS CODE! Even minor but noticeble improvements should be mentioned to add to the size of the document and impress users. ALso usability improvements should all be prominently mentioend to change the perception that some have of KDE.